Women's Retreat Weekend, or why I'd never cut it as a single parent

Katrina took off for the Women's Retreat at church last weekend. A weekend filled with the three essential "f 's" of Christian gatherings - fellowship, fun and food. Plus some great teaching and worship time. Altogether, a wonderful time for her to get away to recharge her spiritual and emotional batteries.

A weekend of sheer, grueling hell for me.

For those of you who have been counting, I've been a father for seven months now. A father of three wonderful, precocious, gifted, precious, beautiful little girls. Little girls who give me kisses and hugs all the time and call me "Daddy" and want me to play catch with them and to kiss their boo-boos (well, Kayla's boo-boos, anyway).

Now, I love spending time with my girls. They, along with my wife, are my light and substance in this physical world - the promise that the sun, as my father would often remind me, does rise every morning, that nothing is impossible through God's love, and that no one is irredeemable.

All that aside, I never knew what I was getting into by agreeing to let Kat go away for the weekend. In 36 years, I have never understood the word "tired" as I do now.

She left Friday afternoon, amid many a hug and a kiss (and a couple tears). Kayla and I actually watched the van drive out of sight down the road. Being a fellow who is trying to work on being plan-oriented, I had one in place for much of the weekend. Here's how it looked:
Friday: Mom leaves. Take kids over to school for PTA-sponsored bingo night.
Saturday: First day alone with the kids. Take them to OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) for the day. Maybe watch a movie that night.
Sunday: Church, then mom comes home.

Simple. Beautiful in its simplicity, really. I was quite proud of it.

Friday, we went to Bingo. I made major points with the principal by helping her calibrate the video projector she was using to display the numbers. While I was up doing this, Emily took it upon herself to play my board for me... and I won! I got a goodie bag filled with stuff that is best described as "stuff mommy will like." A candle, a fold-out wooden sign that says "Spring," a picture frame, a tissue box holder, and, inexplicably, a set of Christmas cards (?). Still, we won. I knew Bingo time was over for Kayla when, an hour after her bedtime, she began looking everywhere but at her bingo board. I really knew it was over for her when I told her she was going home (the other two would come home with our neighbor, Andrea), and she burst into tears. I could just hear the crowd murmuring to itself: Yeah, that jerk wins the first round, and now he takes his little kid home and doesn't let her play! AAAND he LEAVES his older kids here!!! Hmph!!!

OMSI went okay on Saturday. By "okay," I mean no one screamed, cried, or ended up bleeding.

Sunday morning, since most of the women in the church were gone, and, therefore, many of the kids were farmed out to grandma and grandpa for the weekend, we had a low turnout in Kids Church. Still, the visage of shell-shocked daddies teaching all those Sunday school classes alone was harrowing. In Kids Church, which we run with our friends Eddie and Connie Shamp, there were something like 15 kids, less than half of normal. Eddie, God bless 'im, brought the new Veggie Tales DVD, so we plugged that in. Eddie ran herd over the kids, and I fell asleep in a chair back by the A/V rig in the back of the multipurpose room. I was awakened twice: once by a kid to ask me if she could go to the bathroom, and once by Emily, to tell me, "Dad, you fell asleep!"

Now, one of the things I get on Kat for is her occasional trip with the kids to one of the local fast-food establishments, usually Wendy's or Burgerville. We're trying to teach these kids the importance of good nutrition and proper eating habits in our home. Fast food simply doesn't fit this bill, dontcha know.

But cooking for three kids, let alone myself, is not something I'd reckoned with.

So, here I am, admitting it publicly: I FED MY KIDS PURE CRAP THE ENTIRE WEEKEND THEIR MOTHER WAS GONE.

There. Confession is good for the soul. I feel better.

Friday night, they had Wendy's, I had Panda Express. Father, forgive me.

Saturday morning (note: our only home-cooked meal all weekend), Nikki and Kayla had chocolate chip pancakes, while Emily and I had omelets. Not too shabby, until one realizes that I didn't actually feed my younguns until almost 11:30, thereby pretty much precluding any opportunity to call the meal "breakfast," and generally running out of options for "brunch" as well. I won't go into why it took so long - part of it, I'm sure, was an imposing sense of ennui as I contemplated the enormous stack of unwashed dishes that had piled up from the nights I had been gone at school conferences the week before. (In addition to being breadwinner and chief bottlewasher, I am, in a real sense, head dishwasher at home as well).

Saturday lunch was probably the most grievous of my sins against my children. I fed them... I can't even bear to say it. I fed them Lunchables. I used to think that Lunchables were pretty cool - kinda like, I dunno, Astronaut food. I always dug how all the foodstuffs came in these little prepackaged sections, and I just loved that little mustard packet that you squeeze together like a zit in inverse to apply condiments to your little crackers 'n cheeze sandwiches. However, it's been brought to my attention that eating Lunchables products can quite literally preserve a human body for decades after death with the salt content alone. And I fed that crap to my children. Oh, the humanity.

It gets worse. Not just Lunchables did I give my children, mind you, but the "gimmick" Lunchables, because I made the rookie Dad mistake of allowing the kids to select their own. Emily had some sort of reasonable one, with churkey or ticken or something like that as the main "meat product." Nikki's was a travesty called "Pizza," which amounted to a packet of "sauce product" which one would squirt onto flattened crackers (that suspiciously resembled the little matzoh crackers my Jewish friends would eat during Passover), upon which one would put shredded "cheese food product" from a little plastic bag. Mm! Mm! Barf!! (The "pizza" lunchable also had the makings for a "dessert pizza" - you'd have to save one of your matzoh crackers and spread this "chocolate food spread" over it, then coat it with candy sprinkles. Now, if that ain't nutrition, I don't know what is).

Another peeve of mine that has been relegated to the dustbin of unaware husbands suddenly made aware of reality is the general condition of the house. Now, we aren't the neatest people, although we both like things picked up and cleaned up. (I'm not quite the obsessive cleaning freak I was several years ago. Some of you may remember him - he's gone to sleep courtesy of Zoloft. But that's a different story). I had these grand plans that I'd wake up before the kids and clean the house top to bottom - waiting until they were awake, of course, for the vacuuming and heavy lifting - and maybe finish those touch-ups to the living room paint I've been meaning to get to for over a year now.

I must sit back for a moment and contemplate the sheer folly of it all. Clean house? With KIDS? What was I thinking?

Kat came home to the house in possibly the worst shape its ever been in in six years. Dishes? The only ones we used, from breakfast Saturday morning, were still on the counter, slowly crusting over. Toys? The family room was a veritable plastic rave, complete with miniature Polly Pockets and oversized Barbies. Barbie's new '06 Mustang seemed to have had a head-on with her old minivan, though this was of little consequence since the minvan was filled with crayons, the number of which kept on decreasing over the weekend as the dog realized she likes the waxy little sticks. Mmm, tastes like crap! Clothes? In the hamper, you say? No way! Try on the floor between the kids' bathroom and their rooms. A herd of wild llamas could have run through the house and created less chaos.

To sum it all up, here's what I text messaged Katrina while she was still at the retreat:

NEXT PERSON WHO SAYS YOU'RE "JUST A HOUSEWIFE" GETS PUNCHED RIGHT IN THE NOSE. YOU'RE SUPERGIRL. MISS YOU, LOVE YOU... COME HOME NOW!!!!